


Interlude: Dreams and Conversations in the Night

by PureBatWings



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Dreams and Nightmares, Flashbacks, Hurt/Comfort, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, PTSD, Period-Typical Homophobia, broken wrist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-14 00:21:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10525002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PureBatWings/pseuds/PureBatWings
Summary: Graves has a nightmare and PTSD episode where he mistakes Credence for Grindelwald...Uses some of my head canon from Credence Dreams but not necessary to read, this can be a short standalone vignette.Usual legal disclaimers apply. Not my characters, not for money, no copyright infringement implied.





	

Credence entered into Graves’ room. He reached over and touched the muttering, cursing, half-awake man’s shoulder.

“Wake up, Mr. Graves, it's a nightmare, sir—“ said Credence, shaking him again. Suddenly the man growled “You bastard!” and grabbed his wrist and tackled him, slamming him to the floor on his back and knocking the wind out of him. He sat on Credence’s chest, one hand on his throat. “You’re not tricking me again, Grindelwald, I’ll fucking strangle you first.”

“Sorry,” choked Credence, and with an effort, he stopped struggling, surrendering by letting his muscles go lax. Some things hurt less if you just gave in. Greyness clouded his vision. The hand loosened just a little on his throat, but the wand at his carotid artery didn’t waver.

“Swear that you are Credence Barebone.”

“I swear on the Bible, I’m Credence,” he rasped, holding the man’s fierce gaze in the room’s dim light, willing him to see the truth.

“Swear on your magic, you mind-fucker.”

“I swear—on my magic-- Mr. Graves, I’m Credence Barebone, no one else.”

Graves watched him like a hawk to see if he showed any distress, at least any greater than having the weight of a well-muscled man perched on his chest like an incubus. Credence lay still, waiting for Graves to unwind and make up his mind that Credence was who he said he was. He hoped the auror decided soon, his wrist was hurting as though it might be sprained. And Mr. Graves’ cologne smelled wonderful up this close. That was a nice distraction from his throbbing wrist.

Graves lowered his wand from his neck and poked Credence none too gently in the ribs.

“We’re gonna sit together, you and I, Mr. Barebone, for an hour until the potion has worn off. Any sudden moves and I’ll hex you to death before you can blink one eye, Gellert.”

“Could we talk while we wait?” asked Credence, who was floated to a chair and his wrists, ankles and shoulders lashed to its frame. Finally, slowly, Graves nodded. “We can talk, but I still might hex you.”

“What did He do that made you think I could be him?” He decided to wait to mention his hurt wrist, it might be seen as an escape ploy by the twitchy fingered wizard. If most hexes felt anything like beatings, he didn’t want to end up the target of one.

“Plague, pestilence and poxes on polyjuice potion,” spat Graves. He regarded Credence keenly. “Did He ever touch your hair or head, erstwhile Credence?”

Credence blushed a bit, remembering how he’d melted into the hugs. “He would hold me against his shoulder too tightly, stroke my hair or hold me by the scruff of my neck and tell me what a good boy I was for looking so diligently.”

“Opportunity, motive, means…” murmured Graves, ticking them off on his fingertips. He explained, “polyjuice potion requires a small amount of another’s hair to allow the transformation for about an hour. After that, the transformed person has to consume more potion to keep up the disguise.”

Credence wished he could hold Mr. Graves’ hand. “So he used your hair to fool everyone that he was you…. Did he disguise himself as me? Why would he do that when you and I barely knew each other? I was just your no-maj errand boy.”

Graves ran his free hand through his already mussed hair and sighed deeply. “He kept me alone for days, even the drugged meals were magicked in. There were no windows, no books, no one to talk with, I had no idea how much time had passed. He used his skills to delve into my mind, to see my hopes, my fears, my idle thoughts and deepest beliefs.”

“I started hallucinating things such as my boyfriend at Ilvermorny drowning himself because he was queer and Seraphina’s patronus slicing me open with its talons and feasting on my intestines like Prometheus while she applauded. Those ghastly visions I could eventually convince myself weren’t real. The third one-- it was harder to discern the truth.”

He broke off and let out a shuddering long breath. “My third vision was you, Credence, but I could hold you, you were there, clinging to me. You beseeched me to protect you, then to make love to you.”

Credence’s eyes grew wide. How---

But the other man, looking into the middle distance, lost in the memory, kept talking “Give me my first real kiss, you said, so I did. We kissed for ages. Hold me tight, you pleaded. I did, holding you close to me, stroking your back because you begged so prettily with tears in your eyes and I wanted--” he cut himself off, to Credence’s intense disappointment.

“And then the potion wore off and there sat that sadist, Grindelwald, gloating that I would lower myself to touch a filthy no-maj, a clueless little squib. He mocked me, that a Graves, from one of the nation’s founding families, an upholder of the statutes of secrecy would be so big a hypocrite. He knew that I wanted to protect you and that I had healed you when it was possible, so he disguised himself as you to torment me.”

“You wanting to protect me mattered, you have no idea how much,” murmured Credence. “You made me feel I was worth something. When he was you, he said if I could find the Obscurial child then he would teach me magic and I could live with him. I wanted that more than anything, and I still do. I’m too old to go to school with twelve year olds, even if they’d let me go to Ilvermorny.”

Graves’ head shot up and he started at Credence. “You are someone, worthy not just for what you can do.”

“I matter because I’m magic, you mean,” said Credence shrewdly.

“You being magic simplifies everything—I can shelter you in my house and teach you basic spells and MACUSA will go easier on both of us since I didn’t violate Rappaport’s law,” said Graves, choosing not to answer the question implied in Credence’s statement.

Seeing his confusion he explained. “No contact is allowed between majs and no-majs, no revealing our existence to the greater American society so that there isn’t another Salem witch hunt. "

"You asked me in the diner at our first meeting what my job was—as MACUSA’s head of magical security I protect wizards and witches by upholding the statues of secrecy and other laws. I do what I need to do to make sure no-majs seeing the Ghost newspaper or other magic things have their memories of the event wiped out by obliviate spells.”

“Modesty found a lost wand a week before my Obscurus broke free,” Credence confessed. “Mary Lou found it that awful night and broke it in half, I don’t know what happened to it.”

“More than a month or so without some magic in its proximity and a wand is spelled to revert to a stick in a rural location or in the city it degrades to a splinter of packing crate or a long matchstick. Given how important and personal someone’s wand is, they aren’t lost very often, except by a few very senile people approaching their 200th birthdays.”

They lapsed into several minutes’ silence, Graves grimly waiting to see if Credence morphed into the blond German wizard, and Credence wondering if it was safe to ask his watchful captor any more questions. Credence took a long slow breath and let it out. Graves’ wand trained on him didn’t twitch.

“When you’re satisfied it’s me, sir, I think my wrist is sprained or broken. Will you heal it or is that my lesson not to wake you during a nightmare?” he inquired calmly. It really did hurt and he hoped Mr. Graves would be merciful.

“No one’s woken me from my nightmares for a long time, since the war,” Graves allowed. “It’s usually just me waking up having wound my bedsheets around my body or neck and dreaming I’m buried under the French mud of a collapsed trench, without my wand within reach. My wandless magic wouldn't be enough to move a ton of wet earth, so I'm trapped and suffocating...”

He shook himself from his war memories. “Of course if you’re Credence I’ll heal your wrist. If you’re not, I’m going to regret not sounding an alert to have my aurors storm this place while I break your other wrist and snap your neck.”

Credence gulped. Neck-snapping sounded like something very final that Al Capone’s mafiosos would do when a knuckle sandwich, cement overshoes and a long walk on a short pier didn’t do the trick.

“How much longer?” he squeaked, his voice breaking.

Graves cast a tempus charm. “Thirty minutes for me to be absolutely certain.” He was mostly sure Credence was Credence, but eighty-percent wasn’t certainty.

Looking for a harmless topic he asked Credence, “what’s the first thing you put in your treasure box?” It was a test to see if an imposter could even come up with a plausible story.

Credence looked both sad and a little embarrassed. “I told you a little about my friend, Pat at the diner,” he began, “how the day I heard he was dead and I got proof magic existed.”

“When was that?”

Credence cast his mind back—“1919, um, January when Prohibition started.”

”Oh yeah, that was about the time Prez Corey had pulled strings and I was put in as acting Director while my boss Madlyn Peyroux was recovering from a really nasty Voudoun curse’s side effects of malaria and brain fever. Wreaked havoc with her magic’s consistency too,” he added reflectively. “How did you and Pat meet, how’d you become pals?”

So Credence told him more about Pat—how smart he was at selling papers, how he had fended for himself since he was eleven or twelve, Buster the rat killer dog and how Credence still wanted to have a dog or two someday. He told Mr. Graves about Pat’s cute freckles and how he’d given Credence a lock of his red hair as a friendship token—“Since he didn’t have anything else he could give me—“ explained Credence.

“And I hacked off a bit of my hair and gave it to him wrapped in some tissue paper. I don’t know what happened to his things when he died of the flu, it probably got tossed on a rubbish heap. Later I found a bit of ribbon in a haberdashery—I told the salesgirl I wanted some blue ribbon for a girl I was sweet on, that matched her eyes. She gave it to me at a discount and I tied up his hair with it."

“Blue eyes, red hair and freckles, then?”

“Very, and even when he said something argumentative they would sparkle. He loved a good debate, he said, and so I started reading his old papers to learn about the world and beat him in an argument. A lot of times he would stuff my fliers into a bunch of his papers to give them away and we would talk while he did his sales patter and he’d explain things to me about crushes and girls and the people around us.”

“What confused you?”

“Oh, when we started hanging around together when I was ten in Times Square, I didn’t understand why the pretty painted ladies would go off walking with the flashy swells they had just met and then be back again in an hour and go off with another man. So Pat explained about fucking for money and whores and pimps, johns and queer boys and how to spot and avoid the men who wanted to get physical with little boys like me for fun instead of doing it with another grown up.”

He looked at Graves soberly, “Pat never said, but I think he must have had to do some sexual things he musta hated for money in order to eat when he ran away from home, before he got his newsboy job. And he didn’t want something else horrible to happen to me in addition to Mary Lou’s punishments.”

Graves sighed, there were so many no-majs he would love to _crucio_ on sight for hurting children and the defenseless. This impulse was one good reason why there were laws against interacting with no-majs.

“Pat explained a bit about how the streetwalkers talked to avoid the police catching them, but to let their customers know they were up for a good time. We also looked at what people wore (or didn’t). Sometimes the older johns looking for men or boys would wear red ties or green carnations in their lapels as a signal. In the summertime, some of the whores didn’t wear slips or underthings,” he added, a little ashamed at noticing.

Graves was intrigued. “So that’s one reason you tried to identify wizards and witches by their clothing. “ It made sense and he wondered if this was something his undercover aurors and trainees could learn faster instead of having years of experience to figure out the different ways certain types of no-majs dressed for work or social class. This was something he could look into when he was back working as Director actively.

“If Sherlock Holmes could figure out a man’s job by his shoes or the tobacco brand he smoked, I figured, well I’m not a genius like Mr. Holmes, but I’ve got eyes in my head and a good memory,” said Credence almost defiantly. His wrist was hurting like a bitch by this point.

“Indeed you do, and striking dark ones. I was a little surprised you hadn’t a sweetheart, even with Mary Lou’s prohibitions,” mused Graves.

Credence really did not want to discuss this. Mr. Graves would figure out he was a fairy, and worse, had a crush on him. Then things would go horribly wrong. He didn’t think Graves would hex him just for being queer since he had said he had a boyfriend as a teenager.

“You said Grindelwald disguised himself as your school friend? How did you know it was fake?”

“I’ve mentioned Edmund to you— we were only good friends by the time he was killed during the war and I saw his ghost. We had fooled around with each other at Ilvermorny, practicing kissing for girls with each other, comparing sizes, jerking each other off, the things a lot of boys do before they go on to get with girls. Usually.”

Credence felt a small spark of hope. He looked at Graves intently. “Are you a usual or an unusual man, sir?"

Graves eyes widened. “I’m married to my work…” he parried, before he relented. “All right, truth… I slept with a few women and a man or two when I was a trainee auror. Some witches were fun as lovers, but I now tend more to admire men. Though my job really does keep me too busy to bother with seriously going out with anyone.”

Credence braved himself. “I don’t like girls and women like I’m supposed to. I mean, of course I notice if they’re really pretty like Miss Queenie, but it’s like a pretty sunset or a flower—I wouldn’t want or need to kiss a rose, but I can admire it. I know a lot of people think homosexuals are sinful and perverted or sick in the head. What do witches and wizards think?"

Graves thought a minute. “It depends, of course. Most don’t care if the family name continues and there are grandchildren to claim the family home and treasures. Usually if a partnership is discreet, most people with ignore it especially if one or both partners are magically or politically powerful. You don’t shout it from the top of the Woolworth building. While most people won’t ask for details or confirmation that you're together as a couple, they will invite your “particular friend” to balls and parties with you.”

“My sister is outgoing and loves parties and her husband Xathus loathes them, so usually I escort her. I’m sure witches and wizards in other parts of the country who are bent do have lavender marriages to each other as protective cover. Big cities make it a little easier to both keep quiet about one’s preferences and meet partners in gathering places.”

Credence digested this. “Please, could you take me to one of those speakeasies for homosexual wizards sometime?”

Graves smiled at the predictable request. “Yes. It wouldn’t be long before you find a dashing young wizard to tickle your fancy… and other parts.”

Of course he had noticed Credence had a bit of a crush on him--that would pass once he met more people, better suited to him than a broken, nightmare-ridden auror who might or might not be reappointed to his directorship. Credence didn’t answer and the pair lapsed into a waiting silence again.

Graves cast tempus again and let his tense posture relax and his drawn wand fall from its defensive stance. He loosened the ropes binding Credence to the chair and floated in a box of medical supplies from the bathroom. “I’m sorry about your wrist, Credence, I didn’t mean to hurt you again,” the older man said, gently placing the twisted wrist on his thigh, palm up. Sure, careful fingers probed at a few tendons and when Credence hissed in pain, Graves sighed.

“Sprain, not break, but a bad one,” he diagnosed and began with fine fast flicks of his wand to chant a healing charm over Credence’s wrist. The younger man felt the warmth glowing heat radiating into his hurt muscles. When Mr. Graves stopped holding his hand and chanting, he realized, with relief that all the pain was gone. Then the warmth surrounded him, moving over his back and hips. “I slammed you pretty hard onto the floor—let me prevent any bruises I made from getting worse.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Credence, withdrawing his hand. He wished he could figure out a way to get closer to Mr. Graves without being hurt like this again.


End file.
